API Deployment Templates As Part Of A Wider API Governance Strategy

05 Dec 2017

People have been asking me for more stories on API governance. Examples of how it is working, or not working at the companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies I’m talking with. Some folks are looking for top down ways of controlling large teams of developers when it comes to delivering APIs consistently across large disparate organizations, while others are looking for bottom ways to educate and incentivize developers to operate APIs in sync, working together as a large, distributed engine.

I’m approach my research into API governance as I would any other area, not from the bottom up, or top down. I’m just assembling all the building blocks I come across, then began to assemble them into a coherent picture of what is working, and what is not. One example I’ve found of an approach to helping API providers across the federal government better implement consistent API patterns is out of the General Services Administration (GSA), with the Prototype City Pairs API. The Github repository is a working API prototype, documentation and developer portal that is in alignment with the GSA API design guidelines, providing a working example that other API developers can reverse engineer.

The Prototype City Pairs API is a forkable example of what you want developers to emulate in their work. It is a tool in the GSA’s API governance toolbox. It demonstrates what developers should be working towards in not just their API design, but also the supporting portal and documentation. The GSA leads by example. Providing a pretty compelling approach to model, and a building block any API provider could add to their toolbox. I would consider a working prototype to be both a bottom up approach because it is forkable, and usable, but also top down because it can reflect wider organizational API governance objectives.

I could see mature API governance operations having multiple API design and deployment templates like the GSA has done, providing a suite of forkable, reusable API templates that developers can put to use. While not all developers would use, in my experience many teams are actually made up of reverse engineers, who tend to emulate what they know. If they are exposed to bad API design, they tend to just emulate that, but if they are given robust, well-defined examples, they will just emulate healthy patterns. I’m adding API deployment templates to my API governance research, and will keep rounding off strategies for successful API governance, that can work at a wide variety of organizations, and platforms. As it stands, there are not very many examples out there, and I’m hoping to pull together any of the pieces I can find into a coherent set of approaches folks can choose from when crafting their own approach.